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Pinball Arcade – Twilight Zone Table Out Today

Posted by Bobby King on Feb 05, 2013 // Lead Designer, FarSight Studios

This is Bobby King from FarSight Studios, the makers of the Pinball Arcade for PS3 and PS Vita. We are super excited to announce that today, thanks to our fans, we’ll be releasing our re-creation of one of the greatest pinball tables ever – Twilight Zone!

With the help of the pinball legend Roger Sharpe, who did the original table’s licensing deal for Williams/Bally, we were able to get the CBS-owned rights to the TV show. This deal was too expensive for us to make the numbers work, though. We would have lost money with the number of sales we were projecting. But thanks to our players and pinball fans all around the world who chipped in through Kickstarter.com – we got the extra money that we needed to make the deal for the Twilight Zone IP!

This is such a great table. Personally, it’s my second favorite to play in our game right behind Star Trek: The Next Generation (which we’ll be releasing before the end of next month, but I’m getting ahead of myself).

Twilight Zone is awesome! It’s an unbelievably deep gameplay experience. One of the features that Pinball Arcade is noted for is our comprehensive instruction on how to play each table. The instructions for Twilight Zone are the longest – 710 screens.

Pinball Arcade Producer/Designer Scott Shelton writes these instructions and also happens to be the best pinball player at our studio, so I’m going to hand it off to him to explain what makes the Twilight Zone table so much fun.

“It is the most complex table we have worked on to date.”

“The main reasons Twilight Zone is such a great table is the cool theme and the incredible number of features it has. The Twilight Zone show is just a perfect theme for a pinball table and they did a great job of tying episodes of the show into the various modes.

As far as features, it is, hands down the most complex table we have worked on to date. It’s clear that Pat Lawlor was given free reign when designing Twilight Zone after the commercial success of his previous design, The Addams Family.

When I’m playing the game, I tend to activate most of the features and modes on the table through normal gameplay, which is a testament to how well it is designed. A lot of tables have features that are so obscure that you’re unlikely to ever see them. The flow of Twilight Zone is such that the modes are getting activated left and right, just by making various shots on the table.

“These invisible flippers let you ‘flip’ the ball towards a hole at the end of the Powerfield.”

When I’m playing, I try to focus on earning Door Panels as quickly as possible so that I can play the Lost in the Zone mode. You don’t have to wait for one Door Panel mode to end before activating the next one, and they can be activated from the Player Piano Hole or the Slot Machine. When I’m in a groove, I can get into a pattern where I shoot the Slot Machine to activate a Door Panel and then shoot the Right Ramp to relight the Slot Machine. Shooting the Right Ramp also sets you up for a shot at the Player Piano Hole to activate another Door Panel. Repeating this method over and over gets you through the Door Panels very quickly. Even better, shoot the Right Ramp when it’s lit for Battle the Power to send the ball to the Powerfield. On the Powerfield, you use one of Twilight Zone’s most unique features, the magnetic flippers. These invisible flippers let you “flip” the ball towards a hole at the end of the Powerfield. Successfully making that shot, scores a bunch of points and earns another Door Panel.”

For those that don’t know, Pinball Arcade was one of the first cross-buy games for PS Vita. Purchasing anything for our game entitles you to it for both the PS3 and PS Vita versions!

Thanks for your continued support of this fantastic game! I check here every week to see if any new tables are being released.

The Pinball Arcade was recently voted 2012 Game of the Year by the community over at Virtual Console Forums, edging out XCOM and Borderlands 2, and all the hard work you guys put in to securing and releasing new, real tables and keeping everything up to date and running smoothly is really appreciated by us pinheads.

I am so stoked about this release. But, I have fears that Farsight has released another buggy table. Black Knight on both PS3 and Vita is unplayable. I hope the four months since the last TPA table release has given Farsight the chance to work out the bugs.

My girlfriend makes a habit out of beating all my hi-scores in this game. I would love to play all of the new tables, but they cost too much individually. Perhaps a dlc pack featuring the last 4 tables could be arranged? Preferably one with discounts for Plus Members?

Glad to see this coming out on PS3/Vita. There’s quite a backlog of tables that came out on IOS but not here yet. Is it just TZ in this DL or all the others as well?
I wish they would add an option to change the games ball launch to a button. I’m one of quite a few that have modded fightstick controllers to use in pinball, and this game forces a ball launch with a second joystick, (unlike the Zen series) which makes the modded sticks useless since they only have a single stick.

TZ is being released today. Scared Stiff and Big Shot are due out next week. The week after that will be the release of the Pro upgrades for Tales and Medieval Madness. The Pro Version of MM is my favorite.

We will look into adding the function of the X button launching with a full plunge.

Thanks for the update, Bobby! I’m a Kickstarter backer and I’m curious when I’m getting my code. Someone posted recently on your Facebook page that we might not get them till the end of the week. I do have to say if this is true I am really, well there’s no other word for it, angry about this. It would be unfair for those of us who pledged money months and months in advance to have to wait an extra week to get the table they helped make happen. I hpoe this isn’t true and I’ll be getting my code emailed to me later today. Please let us know what is going on with this. Thanks.

@2 – The recent 2.07 patch seems to have fixed a lot of issues on Black Knight as far as I can tell. Much more playable now.

Black Knight is not playable in its current form. NO GI, lighting sequences at all. Since they’re not going to fix it fot the PS3 they might’ve well give us a delete button. And the physics are as floaty as ever…also CV got screwed up with the latest update.

WOW! Not even a single mention of how the Kickstarter backers, the very people who made this table possible, will be able to get their table!

So the thanks we get as people who funded your table is to watch other people enjoy it while we wait in silence?
Come on Bobby you know this isn’t right so SAY SOMETHING!

Also Sony, I don’t understand why you can’t seem to fix your log in screen on mobile devices.
It’s just a tad ridiculous that i have to Remote Desktop onto a PC just to comment!!
And your “tech department” is baffled by this. So sad….

Under Pinball options on vertical mode. PLEASE enable the option to be able to use the back touch pad for the flippers. Zen Pinball 2 uses the same engine as you all (the interface is exactly the same). When you go to their option there on vertical mode you can switch it to allow the back pad to use the flippers.

IT IS SOO MUCH FUN on Pinball to use flippers with back tough screen. But when you go to the change option on your Pinball Arcade, it kind glicks and does nothing, and does not switch the controls like it is suppose to.

PLEASE fix this so that it does it. I can’t even bring my self to play Pinball Arcade on the Vita because I hate using the front touch screen to use the flippers so bad on vertical mode compared to the back touch screen. Thank you SOO much if you have them fix this error.

Will this update provide stereoscopic 3D support? That is one of the great features of Zen Pinball 2 and I can’t wait to have the experience in Pinball Arcade!

Also, will the Mac version be getting any updates soon. My computer has more power than a PS3 but the Pinball Arcade for Mac looks about like it would on a low-end iPod touch. Look forward to high resolution and lighting for Mac that catches it up to the PS3 version!

Thanks again, Bobby! I know you folks are super busy and are working on getting around to all these things. I’m one of your patient users who knows that the upgrades do come when you get the time for them.

Final note: I was playing the iOS tournament like crazy to try to win the ball skins and then the tournament ended several hours early. Any chance you’ll increase the number of participants that will receive the ball skins by 100 or so for those that didn’t truly get to make their last push to boost their scores?

Finally! My bro and I have been waiting for this table for quite a while. One thing I love about the Pinball Arcade (aside the tables) is that they explain the player all the details of the table. Now I’ll be able to know how to play, and practicing, before going to play TZ in my local pinball arcade. :D

Finally! Nice to see a new table, and get news that the other tables that have already have trophy lists added are coming next week. I hadn’t touched TPA in several months, due to a lack of new tables being released, but I jumped on about a week ago and started craving some new tables. Awesome job to suddenly get them out. Thanks, FarSight!

PS> I found a local arcade with a ton of pinball tables, and I gotta say… it’d be awesome if you could get the Lord of the Rings and South Park tables. Kickstarter for those, possibly?

Hey… Can you make some comment on Black Knight on the PS3? I feel rather burned by the purchase on that one. The table art looks far better on Android, it’s a total mess on PS3. The scripting is off (like both balls launching at the same time on 2 ball multi). The long plastic bit being too high and blocking the view of the upper left flipper. I still think the upper left flipper is at the wrong angle (the front tip is too low, it hits the rear and gets air instead of rolling down it). Balls on the lower field warping to the upper.
I love playing the game but I feel the table that needs most help to get it up to the standard I feel the rest are at is totally ignored.
Are you working on emulating it, or at least cleaning up the script? Will the art be fixed?
I have a hard time paying for future tables when I feel something I already paid for is getting brushed under the rug.

So I assume the next patch will bring us Star Trek TNG and the Tournaments/Champion feature, but will it also include Attack From Mars and Genie… or will that table pack be released as a seperate patch later?

Bobby, there should be a way to get codes out before the product is available. I just got the Wizard’s Edition of Ni no Kuni and in the package itself were the codes for the Gold Drongo and Mite familiars. So it’s possible. You should ask Sony about this. I am sure they would be more than happy to give you codes ahead of time.

Yes! Pinball Arcade won a 2012 Editor’s Choice Award on PSNStores dot com. Nick loved it and has been writing about Pinball Arcade more than anyone I hear. Gosh that guy is a genius, and so is The Pinball Arcade!

(MIght to too late to ask this, but…) I wonder if the next update will have a new UI like the Iphone version. It’s not as nice looking (the images are smaller), but it’s much more functional. I’d love to see one closer to the Pinball HOF interface, though, perhaps with the ability to free roam in the arcade (like you can in Playstation Home). It would be nice to be able to look around at the tables like you would be able to in real life.

I like the product and everything, but as of now there’s a good chance I’m done supporting it. The delay in getting codes to the kickstarter supporters, who paid more than the PSN price is totally unacceptable. The lack of communication from Farsight is even worse, nothing about it from them on their forums or even their facebook page from what I can see, just telling people it will be out today. I was disappointed when I forgot to back the StarTrek table, now I’m relieved.

@41
It was already explained that sending the vouchers before the product was released was impossible. It’s also possible that FarSight didn’t realize this would happen. This is the first time a Kickstarter-enabled table was released, after all.

You paid more than the PSN price because you wanted to help make the TPA version of the table a reality for all of us; thank you for doing that. (I’d have contributed too, but I found out about it too late.)

To anyone who supports a Kickstarter: by doing so, you acknowledge that you are funding a product because you want it to exist. Anything else after that is just icing on the cake, and there are no guarantees regarding the icing!

Yes!!! This table and TNG are immediate purchases for me! Are you using HD audio assets from the bluray releases of those shows to ‘augment’ the original samples in the ROM? (Like a second high-quality audio track at low volume that has the limited frequencies covered by the ROM audio track removed; some binary-translation HD releases of PS2 games have some similar tricks.)

Just please keep iterating on the physics and ball-sticking bugs. When I tried the demo on Vita, I hit stuck-ball bugs on two tables and then didn’t buy until months later when it was deeply discounted.

Ok, I am a bit confused on my end…I downloaded Zen Pinball 2 for free…the download screen said I got the full game, but when I play, I have a time limit, like a demo, and no tables, like a demo, did I miss something, or do I need to buy all the packs in order to enjoy the free game? Like I said, I am just confused..

This isn’t Zen Pinball, bro. Also, it’s my understanding that Zen is merely an application of sorts, and that if you want tables for it you can either download the demo versions or just buy them outright, both of which you can do from within the app. I could be wrong though. You could always try deleting it and re-downloading and see where that gets you.

As for the whole Kickstarter kerfuffle, some folks here really need to get their senses of entitlement in check. As a backer, I don’t recall reading anything in the campaign text that would have led me to believe that we’d get access to the table before anyone else. The only promise made to us was that we’d get it for free. As long as Farsight delivers on that, I see no reason to complain.